In recent years, social media, such as microblog, WeChat, forum, and podcast, have become important channels for people to release messages. Information in the social media usually includes various important data and clues about an ongoing event, and timely discovering and monitoring occurrence and development of a major event by means of messages can improve flexibility and real-time performance of management and decision-making on a critical event.
In an example of a flood in Queensland, New Zealand, the entire course of the flood was presented in different angles on Twitter (the name of one of social media) in real time, for example, what happened, where it happened, who was involved, and an influence on a surrounding environment. The following events all appeared on Twitter: “a yacht is sinking in Brisbane River”, “the port re-opens”, “a shark is washed onto the street”, “office areas of some important government organizations are under temporary control”, and the like. Timely discovering the foregoing events is of great importance to both disaster relief and crisis management.
An existing social message discovering process is that a user actively searches for a social message and collects related social events using a social network client. That is, to acquire a social message, basic information of the social message needs to be manually input to the social network client manually, and then, a browser or the social network client performs searching to acquire a class of social messages according to the basic information of the social message.
In a process of implementing the foregoing social message discovering, social message acquisition is manually triggered, a social network client cannot implement real-time social message monitoring, and therefore, the social network client cannot actively discover, on the Internet, an update on a social event.